Crisis Prevention and Intervention Training for Psychiatric Hospital Staff 1

A 5-day course designed to rain psychiatric hospital staff verbal and physi-cal methods of preventing violence and injury when dealing with upset pa-tients was taught o 89 staff rom maximum and less secure wards. Compared to no-treatment controls, experimental subjects improved significantly on four tests of crisis-related tests and knowledge. Questionnaire and self-report measures from staff and patients on the training wards also indicated posi-tive course effects. Assault frequencies decreased immediately after the course and staff injuries on experimental wards were r duced after the course rela-tive to control wards. For staff working with psychiatric patients, especially those working with patients considered to be an imminent danger to others, the possibility of being assaulted, or of having to intervene in an assault, is one that must be faced on a daily basis. Lion and Reid (1983) have described the s verity of the problem of assaults within psychiatric institutions. Typically, however, staff receive no formal training in managing assaultive patients. At our fa-cility of approximately 500 treatment beds (300 of which are in a maximum security division) there were an average of 532 days lost through staff inju-ries as a result of patient-caused incidents in the 6 years prior to the present ~This research was funded by Grant DM421 from the Ontario Ministry of Health. Thanks are due to the many staff of the Mental Health Centre for their help in designing and teaching the Crisis Prevention and Intervention Course, to Dr. Don Dutton who ran the first rainers workshop and provided much helpful material and advice, and to Dr. G. Harris for providing constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Portions of the data were present